ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR.
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK/ALBANY
20 May 1984 .
commencement remarks
I am honored to have the opportunity to play a role in the launching of
this noble ship, the Class of 1984.
I do not come here today, I must confess, with any great confidence in
the immortality of remarks uttered on these occasions. The commencement address
hardly rates as one of the more notable American art forms. Actually one of
the charms of the ceremony is that no one can remember in later years what a
commencement speaker has said, or, indeed, even who the speaker was. Ask your
parents what eminent figure dispensed wisdom to them at this turning point in
their own lives, and I will be much surprised if they can’conjure the vaguest
recollection out of the caverns of memory. "Commencements,"
one college president
confided to m the other day, "must be viewed as ritual -- which anthropologists
define as a special form of communication without information."
The fact that no one remembers what they say confers on commencement speakers
a certain license, so I might as well take full advantage of the opportunity you
are giving me and speak my mind, Still, I will do my best to detain you no
longer than necessary, representing, as I do, the last obstacle between you
and your diplomas.
In accepting this invitation, I invoke the cautionary words of Abraham
Lincoln when he addressed the Wisconsin Agricultural Society in 1859. "I presume,"
Lincoln said, "I am not expected to employ the time assigned me in the mere
flattery of farmers, as a class. My opinion of them is that, in proportion to
numbers, they are neither better nor worse than other people." In the same spirit,
t will not employ my time in mere flattery of college students as a class. If
anyone cares, my opinion of students is that, in proportion to numbers, they
are neither better nor worse than other people -- except perhaps their
professors; and I do not propose to explain which way that comparison goes.
It does occur to me that exactly forty-six years -- nearly half a century --
ago, I was one of you, sitting and waiting patiently as you now patiently sit
and wait. It occurs to me also that I looked on the alumi returning for their
50th reunion as a venerable collection of doddering old fossils. They were in
fact members of the class of 1884, who had finished college a bare two decades
after the end of the Civil War. In their college years, the telephone and
the typewriter were excitihg novelties. The automobile and the airplane were
unknown. The microchip was undreamed of. My wisdom is probably as relevant to
your future as I supposed theirs was to mine.
My own class -- the Class of 1938 -- graduated forty-six years ago into a
country racked by depression, where ten million people sought work and could not
‘find it. The gross national product amounted to 85 billion in the dollars of
the time. Franklin Roosevelt was under attack as a profligate spender because
two years earlier he had run a budget deficit of $3.5 billion. I must add that
there were compensations: Harvard's tuition in 1938 was $400.
The year after I graduated, the Second World War burst out in Europe.
Three and a half years later the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. On the sixth
anniversary of my commencement, I was overseas in the European Theater of
Operations. I devoutly hope that the Class of 1984 will have, at home and
abroad, a considerably more tranquil future. At any rate, I invite you to
reflect on such matters when you have been out of college the same length of
time I have -- which, if my arithmetic is correct, will be in the year 2030.
If, that is, there will be anyone around in the year 2030. My genetation
debouched into a world torn by depression and war. Those were sufficiently grim
times. I was one of the lucky ones, but some of my classmates never returned
from overseas. Your prospects are at once much better than ours -- and, if
things go wrong, infinitely worse. Science and technology hold out for you a
dazzling and almost unimaginable future. At the same time, science and
technology hold out an alternative future -- unimaginable too, but endlessly,
illimitably black. "Man has mounted science, and is now run away with," the
historian Henry Adams wrote over a century ago. "... Some day science may have
the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide by
blowing up the world."
The day that Henry Adams darkly foresaw has now arrived. I had long supposed
that, with the nuclear genie out of the bottle, the prospect of the suicide of
the human race would have a sobering effect on those who possess the power to
initiate nuclear war. For most of the nuclear age this supposition has been
true. Statesmen have generally understood, as President Kennedy said in 1961,
"Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind." I saw how
after the Cuban missile crisis a shaken Kennedy -~ and a shaken Khrushchev too --
moved swiftly toward a partial ban on nuclear testing and a systematic reduction
of international acrimony.
I no longer, as I look around, have much confidence in the admonitory
effect of the possession of nuclear weapons. We live today in the age of .an
unlimited nuclear arms race. The long effort to bring that arms race under
control -- an effort that had been continuing for a generation under a succession
of American and Soviet leaders -- has come to a halt. In no forum today are the
superpowers talking to each other in an attempt to save the race from suicide.
Each superpower piles up nuclear weapons for itself far in excess of the numbers
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required to oblitetate the other. With nearly 50,000 nuclear warheads in the
hands of the superpowers and heaven knows how many more scattered or hidden or
incipient in other hands, it is all too easy to foresee nuclear war precipitated
by terrorists, or by madness, or by accident, or by misreading signs on a
radar screen.
The prospect ahead is nothing less than the extinction of the human race --
a prospect that, one would think, would call on our best resources of wisdom,
prudence and statesmanship. It should summon above all the capacity for vision
and idealism that has marked the American leaders who most profoundly seized
the imagination and mobilized the hope of the suffering world in this bitter
century -- Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These men were realists,
prepared to fight and fight well, when fighting was necessary. But they were
always concerned to look beyond war to the means of a stable and enduring peace.
Instead we see in our own land today the systematic militarization of
foreign policy -- a development that can only have ominous consequences for
‘the world and for ourselves. Of course military power is essential in the
defense of our nation. No one knows that better than those of us who served in
the Army overseas during the Second World War. The United States in this
dangerous world must have a defense second to none. But arms are only one
element in the conduct of foreign affairs. Under the present administration,
the military element has burst out of rational control and today dominates all
other aspects of policy.
The Department of Defense is requesting $305 billion in appropriations for
the fiscal year 1985 and demands a total of $1.8 trillion over the next five
years, 1985-89. On top of the $900 billion already appropriated since
Mr. Reagan's inauguration, the Reagan administration, if it is returned to
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office in 1984, will spend nearly $3 trillion for defense by 1989. $3 trillion --
a sum like that defies comprehension.
Of course the Pentagon claims that every cent is vital to the security of
the nation -- one dime less, they tell us, and we are in deep trouble. The
wilitary always claims this. Military budgets, power, prestige depend on such
claims. But claiming does not make it so. "No lesson seems to be so deeply
inculeated by the experience of life," said Lord Salisbury, the British statesman,
“as that you never should trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing
is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you
believe the soldiers, nothing is safe."
There is no greater racket in the world today than the tacit collusion
between the Pentagon and the Soviet Defense Ministry, each side asserting that
the other is stronger in order to get bigger budgets for themselves. This tacit
conspiracy, based on a common vested interest in crisis, is a major problem for
statesmen seeking peace. ‘As President Kennedy said to Norman Cousins, then
editor of the Saturday Review, in the spring of 1963, "Mr. Khrushchev and I
occupy approximately the same political positions inside our governments. He
would like to prevent a nuclear war but is under severe pressure from his hard-
line crowd, which interprets every move in that direction as appeasement. I've
got similar problems.... The hard-liners in the Soviet Union and the United
States feed on one another." They are feeding even more voraciously on each
other twenty-one years later.
And today we Americans do not have civilian leadership inclined to question
and contain military demands. Instead, every bleat from the Pentagon is regarded
with reverence in the White House. "Why is it," asked Senator Dale Bumpers of
Arkansas the other day, "we exalt Government when it builds bombs and missiles,
and condemn it when it spends money to vaccinate children, provide health care
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to the poor and elderly, fund crippled children's clinics and aid students
who are bright and yearn for a college education but who come from families that
can't possibly afford it?" Yet we know that no part of government is more
spend-thrift, wasteful, prodigal and carefree in throwing the taxpayers’ money
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about than the armed services.
This year is the centenary of the birth of Harry Truman. I can imagine no
better way than to commemorate that great man than for Congress to establish a
Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program on the model of the
t committee Harry Truman so ably and responsibly chaired during the Second World
War. With a new Truman Committee, perhaps we would have the Pentagon buying
fewer $1.08 machine screws for $36.77, fewer 17 cent lampbulbs for $44, fewer
$7.99 electrical plugs for $726.86. We would have fewer cases, as after that
glorious American triumph over Grenada, where the Army awarded 8612 medals
t though it never had more than 7000 troops on the island. Do you realize that
the Army has many more generals today than it had in 1945 when it was six times
larger? And do you still take the defense budget seriously?
This blank check for the Pentagon is the inevitable result of a foreign
policy that sees military action as an instrument not of last but of first
resort. Whatever the problem, this administration reaches instinctively for
the gun. Arms sales replace diplomacy in our relations with the Third World,
and in the Reagan years the United States has reached the proud position of
top arms salesman to developing nations, supplying nearly 40 percent of arms
i delivered as against 17 percent from the Soviet Union. If Lebanon is torn by
i historic feuds and antagonisms, send in the Marines and fix it all up. If
Grenada has an obnoxious government, send in the Army and overthrow it. If we
don't like what is ‘going on in Nicaragua, tell the CIA to mine its harbors and
to organize guerrillas. If there are age-old social conflicts in El Salvador,
cure them by guns. We have sent $100 million in military aid to El Salvador
in the last year, and the administration is asking for another $300 million
over the next eighteen months. Then, if the El Salvador regime fails to defeat
the insurgents, with U.S. prestige irretrievably committed through the massive
Reagan military aid program, the inevitable next step will be to send in U.S.
troops -- that is, if Mr. Reagan is reelected. For he will certainly interpret
reelection as a mandate for unilateral U.S. military intervention in
Central America.
It is ironic that this most bellicose of modern American Presidents should
be the one and only President of the Second World War generation who saw no
service overseas during that war. Or perhaps it is not so odd, for Presidents
who have experienced war at first hand are less insouciant about sending new
generations of young men out to kill and to die.
Mr. Reagan tries to make himself the personification of patriotism. He
talks a lot about "standing tall" and rushing to the defense of the republic.
“LE asked to compare the President with, say, George McGovern, many Americans
would choose Mr. Reagan as the quintessential American patriot. Yet, when the
republic was in its greatest danger in my lifetime, Mr. Reagan fought the
Second World War on the film lots of Hollywood, sleeping in his own bed every
night, while Mr. McGovern was a bomber pilot, flew 35 missions, twice brought
in planes severely damaged by antiaircraft fire and won the Distinguished Flying
Cross. That sounds to me like real patriotism.
There are occasions when military action is essential, as World War II
veterans well know. But in the nuclear age force should be employed only when
national security is vitally threatened and when all other means fail.
Diplomacy has become a lost art these days in Washington. In the meantime, the
promiscuous resort to force, the relentless militarization of purpose and remedy,
only heighten the danger of world war.
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The militarization of policy has made us look trigger~happy to the rest of
the world. It frightens our friends quite as much as it frightens our foes;
and, as realists, we must understand that, despite all our power, we cannot
achieve any major objective in foreign affairs on our own. Mrs. Thatcher and
President Mitterand have been our most faithful friends in Europe. Even they
object to the invasion of Grenada, the militarization of Central America, the
mining of Nicaraguan harbors. So do leading Latin American democracies, like
Mexico, Venezeula and Argentina.
In ignoring the reaction of other nations, we are ignoring the wisdom of
the Founding Fathers. "An attention to the judgment of other nations," the
63rd Federalist Paper reminds us, "is important to every government for two
reasons: the one is, that, independe:tly of the merits of any particular plan
or measure, it is desirable, on various accounts, that it should appear to
other nations as the offspring of a wise and honorable policy; the second is,
that in doubtful cases, particularly where the national councils may be warped
by some strong passion or momentary interest, the presumed or known opinion of
the impartial world may be the best guide that can be followed. What has not
America lost by her want of character with foreign nations; and how many errors
and follies would she not have avoided, if the justice and propriety of her
measures had, in every instance, been previously tried by the light in which
they would probably appear to the unbiased part of mankind?"
Equally ominous are the problems this militarization of policy creates
for the American Constitution. The Founding Fathers for good reason placed the
power to authorize war in the hands exclusively of Congress. But the idea today
appears to be that Congress must back the President in whatever he thinks should
be done. This is exceedingly dangerous doctrine. Congress has its independent
role in the American polity and, despite what men in high office tell us, is
I under no moral or tonstitutional obligation to support a President in every act
of crime or folly. The last thing we need is a revival of the imperial
Presidency.
The present American course of military unilateralism threatens our
alliances, our Constitution and the peace of the world. Our foreign policy today
| is perilously out of balance. The militarization of purpose and remedy, far
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from contributing to world peace, intensifies the likelihood of world war. The
| time is overdue for the restoration of balance in our conduct of foreign affairs --
| for the revival of the art of diplomacy, for consultation with our allies, for
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| the end of bluster, brag and bullying as our mode of dealing with the rest of
the world.
Military action has its vital place. But it must be the last, not the first,
recourse. No one in this century understood the role of force better than
Winston Churchill. "Those who are prone by temperament and character," Churchill
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wrote in words that apply more than ever in the nuclear age, "to seek sharp and
‘clear-cut solutions of difficult and obscure problems, who are ready to fight
whenever some challenge comes from a foreign Power, have not always been right.
On the other hand, those whose inclination is ... to seek patiently and
\ faithfully for peaceful compromise are not always wrong. On the contrary,
i in the majority of instances they may be right, not only morally but from a
practical standpoint."
If we have leaders who will act on this principle and return to the
generous spirit of the great statesmen of this republic, you members of the
Class of 1984 will have a far better chance to be alive and well in the
year 2034 -- and ready for your own joyous 50th reunion.
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